Will cloud sync be free? Yes!

A lot of people have been asking about the cost of cloud syncing lately. Jürgen himself gives the answer in the comments to these two blog posts:

11 Aug 2009
"All 1.x updates will be free. All the features mentioned in the blog post will be part of upcoming 1.x updates."
[culturedcode.com]

16 Mar 2010
"We are certainly not going to charge for 1.x updates in the future. Cloud sync and sharing will be implemented in 1.x updates. Also, to reiterate what I wrote above, cloud sync has the highest priority."
[culturedcode.com]-“arrivals”.html

I don't lose any sleep over a subscription model vs. free, but @Robert is spot-on with the possibilities. The update to Things that supports cloud sync has been promised as free, but free cloud sync is still speculation at this point.

Pretty much what you said, thurfjell. There are a *lot* of companies competing to get my money (they must not know how little I make ;) ). As much as I love Things, if they want me to pay them for anything again it better be _awesome_ and unable to live without, as right now there's not much I'd pay for what they’ve delivered this year. Don't get me wrong, it's been ok to get some features throughout the year, but frankly a lot more companies give a lot more bang for the buck.

That said, I've never seen CC hint anywhere at a paid cloud sync solution. We'll just see what they say in the next week I guess.

They have certainly hinted at [the possibility of] a paid cloud sync solution now; look at Jürgen's comment at the very bottom of this page: [culturedcode.com]

If CC make the decision that this will be a subscription based sync solution, I'm out. Not because of Things, but because of CC. I don't want to support a company that screws it's customers over in that way, however good the product is. Not that it matters to CC – they will live without me and the few who decide that CC are not worth it. Things will still be an awesome app, but I'd rather live with the suckiness of OF than support CC, if they go down the charge-for-sync-road.

You just can't promise/hint at, that a sync solution that should have been in place at day 1 will soon be in place, for two years, and then charge for it when the major competitors (and many others) manage to offer real/proper synchronisation for free. It is not CCs customers fault that two years worth of development time was spent on this cloud sync solution. CC could have went the incremental way, and probably should have. Two years is not a long time in this business at, this time – it is forever.

Quite frankly, even if CC would not offer me a refund when I leave, I will take the hit and leave.

Deleted by me (nom). I was expressing my disappointment with the tone the thread was taking, but it wasn't helpful & didn't add to the discussion.

I will say this: the comment by Jürgen that @thurfjell referred to does not hint that cloud sync will cost anything. It states, categorically, that CC do not yet have enough information to estimate server load, so they cannot yet predict their costs and hence whether a charge will be required.

@nom: I have edited my comment in this thread to more accurately reflect the content of Jürgen's comment on the blog post I linked to, and the continued content of what I say in my comment on this page.

I won´t mind one bit to pay for a good sync service. If it means that CC will be able to maintain it and improve upon it I´ll gladly pay what they ask for it. Of course they should be paid for their work, just like any other service. If people don´t like what they have to offer they can just buy something else. I have no sympathy for the people who complain about the money they have "wasted" on Things because they can´t use it the way they would like it until the cloud sync service arrives. I paid money for a product back then because I liked what it did back then, now they are working on a service that lets me sync my devices via the cloud, and why should it be free? It´s not my birthright to have a way to sync Things on all my devices via the cloud, people will still be able to sync via WiFi if they don´t want to pay more to CC.
I have only seen one good cloud sync service out there, Dropbox but that´s only free because a small group of people, like me, pay for it. The rest of the sync solutions out there that work really well cost money.

Just like it´s not up to you to decide if you should pay for your groceries in the supermarket or not, it´s not up to you to decide if people should be paid for the work they do.

It´s up to you to decide if you can afford the product/want to pay for the product, and then you can either purchase it for said price or pick something else.

And yes, while it is true that the Omnigroup sync server is free at the moment, they have said that the new features they plan to add to the sync service might cost money. I don´t see it as being that different than what Jürgen said in his blogpost. As far as I understand the CC sync solution opens up for some extra features, and if they decide that they should be paid for all the work they put into it, I see no problem in that.

That they won't charge up to v.2.0 is correct, but this doesn't have to mean, that they won't charge for a subscription based model for using the Cloud Sync solution.
It's okay when they charge for it when it's finally released, just think about that they'll also have to pay the servers to store user accounts. These are not very much for now, as we're currently in beta, but think about how many guys will use it when it's released for the public crowd.

Best example is iOS App Store's In-App Purchase solution. Many developers charge for global Push Notifications, and this is still ok.
I don't know if you heard about Todo by Appigo, but they also give you the possibility to use their Cloud Sync Solution. Price is 16$ for one year.

@Marvin Niedt wrote:
"That they won't charge up to v.2.0 is correct, but this doesn't have to mean, that they won't charge for a subscription based model for using the Cloud Sync solution."

Read the quotes in the first post again. Cloud sync will be part of a 1.x update, and 1.x updates will be free. I guess CC could do what Sophia Teutschler (maker of CoverSutra) did, and totally disregard promises of free upgrades.*

@Marvin Niedt also wrote:
"It's okay when they charge for it when it's finally released, just think about that they'll also have to pay the servers to store user accounts."

The entire OmniSync Server is hosted on a Mac mini. That's a huge cost? A few Mbit/s down and up to a Mac mini can't be that expensive.

* She says that she forgot, though. Doesn't change the fact that she didn't remedy the situation.

Coming across this historic discussion now that Things Cloud is finally out brought a smile to my face... :) But I realized it’s still very relevant, I have lots of thoughts on Things Cloud sync:
Price: As it seems the beta is now free, but will the final version charge for the app, and not for the sync, like some of you said above, or, will it remain free up to v2.0 (like others of you said above)?
Backup: What happens to my backup/historic Things data? In the blog post announcing the beta, they write that “Our next milestone is to enable the import of existing databases into the beta. Until then the beta continues to use an extra database, leaving users’ existing data untouched.” I suppose this means that until the final version is out, the cloud will include only the newly-updated versions of Things and not the old versions?
Why sync on Things at all?? Think about it: Apple’s iCloud (which, btw, doesn’t work so well on all versions of iPhone) enables you to sync all your iPhone/Mac/etc. apps in one place. But Things Cloud will only sync Things. So why not add the ability to (at least) connect Things to other cloud storage services like Box, skydrive and Xeround cloud db? I actually found a discussion here where someone wrote up code to sync Things using Dropbox, and I think this is a great idea! Shout out if you too have been wondering about this :)

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